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adeelarshad82 links to PC Magazine's recent account (updating a similar quest detailed last year) "to see if a decent PC could put together for less than $200. Turns out that between some great deals, an AMD processor, and a Linux OS, it can actually be done." They actually come out with a decent-enough system for that money — but omitting an optical drive in a full-size desktop computer build seems something like cheating.

Yeah, but to be fair, a netbook can't really compare. An Atom's cool for low-power uses, but it's such a slow, dated design you can barely run a functioning computer off it. Even the integrated 6100 GPU on this build is better than Intel's crappy offering on there.

You have to compromise somewhere considering you get a screen, wireless, keyboard and trackpad/mouse (none of which are otherwise covered in this buildup) for that price.

Why do you need it to be fast? Most people only use a computer for browsing. If a computer was fast enough in 1990, it should theoretically be fast enough today assuming that you don't load it down with bulky and badly written OS and applications. Now if only we had programmers left who cared about efficiency...

Browsing isn't what it used to be. For many people, browsing means playing Farmville on Facebook, which will eat up a lot of CPU and memory. And no, Zinga programmers don't really care about efficiency on your computer, only on their servers.

This is honestly true - an optimized set of applications, and even a real low power chip(like the ARM ones in smartphones) is plenty for browsing and such. However, then we run into things like Flash, which sucks the life out of almost anything.Honestly, once we get hardware-accelerated decoding of VP8 available on Linux, and a proper plugin for FF/chrome which allows it to be used with HTML5 video... then that will be less of a problem as *most* youtube videos have webm versions..But until then... *sigh*.

If a computer was fast enough in 1990, it should theoretically be fast enough today

For home users, I see little overlap between what computers were used for in 1990 vs now. Most people who own a home computer now did not even own one then - adoption was about 15% [nsf.gov] at the time.

Even since 2000, although Internet was catching on, the main application of the Internet - video [video-commerce.org] - had barely started catching on.

My experience dates back to second-generation Atoms (I had a first-generation 10" EEE PC) and I'll say they were barely functional. It's certainly able to do most common tasks, just bog slow with it.

Bear in mind your D410 is a dual-core CPU, whereas I'm fairly certain a $199 EEE PC won't be (looking at Amazon, even $250 doesn't net you that). They did get multithreading in with say the N455, though, which is a step forward I guess.

My entire point was just to say that even the best Atom gets blown away by th

Just a few days ago, there was an HP desktop on woot.com for $299. 3Ghz AMD II 64-bit, 4gb ram, 1tb HDD, Windows 7, and Optical drive. There is really no reason to make big sacrifices to save a few dollars.

Seriously. I paid $400 for a new laptop last christmas. I got a dual core AMD with 4 GB RAM and 320 HD. Now that It's back to school season I'm just browsing the deals, for that same $400 I can get a 6GB RAM, Intel i3 dual core, and 640 GB hard drive. To get the equivalent of what I have now, I would only have to pay $250-$300. This is why tablets are overpriced. Anything decent is $500, but for $400 you can have a notebook with some pretty amazing specs.

...And for $700 you can build a top-of-the-line, amd-based gaming machine off Newegg that will run just about everything you throw at it. But that, like your couple of builds, are *still* way above what was managed with the $200 machine.

Or you can get a bottom-end eMachines dual core 15.4" laptop for $230. It ain't fancy but, unlike the article's $200 desktop, it includes monitor, optical drive, input devices, and even a UPS. And it comes with an operating system that will have support for or be supported by whatever peripherals or software the user wants to add without having to call their weird nephew for help.

Because the people that put out content for the computer ship on them. A cheap 4G mem stick is ~$4, to press 4.7G DVD costs them pennies. Until there is a useful way to allow customers to DL onto their own memory sticks, optical will stick around.

What content are you talking about? Last time I checked, all I needed for my Linux distro was available from Internet. Oh, maybe you were talking about content for that non-free operating system starting with "win" and ending with "dows"? But that's not the default on that computer, so why should we care?

CD / DVDs aren't at all a reliable media for backups. I wouldn't recommend anyone to do that, especially for financial data. If you need a backup, do it with a USB hard drive for the local one, and also send an off-site backup over the wire. That is, at least 3 copies (if you include the one you are working on).

I can unequivocally say no. We sell a lot of little desktop computers without an optical drive. They come with Ubuntu usually and maybe 1/3 of our customer base gets one. They are extra. The minimal configured systems are without keyboard, mouse, monitor or optical drive and run $249. People are not renting DVDs any longer and most have never watched a DVD on the computer in the first place. Some areas have a higher than usual younger user base (Portland) and there is more demand for an optical drive (or at

I would not mind having more external optical readers. But I've found that most of them are junk. Expensive, loud, and hot compared to internal drives. But if you do have a nice external drive then you don't need on one your new computer.

The drive is not there for movies or music, but for archived backup disks you created in the past, old applications, old games, etc.

I know I did not even blink about missing an optical drive from my latest build. Even MS supports creating a boot-able USB drive with Windows 7 on it! Granted you need an existing copy of windows but still. I cast my vote firmly in the fewer moving parts camp.

Somehow, I had missed that little bit of "trivia". I have to say, "About time!" I remember my early days with Windows, trying to work around a bad CD-rom in some cases, or a scratched up CD in others. And, trying to get someone's driver installed by way of the floppy drive which was often full of lint and dust. Yes, it's about time that MS actually SUPPORTS a boot-able USB. Take all my headaches, multiplied by all the people worldwide who had to work around that limitation, and you most certainly have

MS may support it, but I burned myself a DVD anyways. Sometimes you really do need something to be on a WORM disc, I'd hate to think what would happen if I forgot what was on the disc and reformatted it.

That being said, we've hit the point where it's sufficient to have on external optical driver per household.

100 CD + 30 DVD (if they are all full, and all your DVDs are 9 GB, which I both don't think reflects reality) would add up to 340 GB. I really hope that this new computer has an HDD bigger than 340 GB, otherwise, many people will complain about it!

60mb/sec? I've never gotten over ~20, even in linear-read from a drive I know can do 80.Still, even a typical SD card is usually a bit faster than a CD due to less seek time. Which is important for installing or booting.

While you can't put usb sticks in a wallet, you CAN put sdcards in one. Specifically one made for trading cards.

I would love to see sdcard media get sold in bulk packs like cdrs are. There is a slight problem with capacities not rounding evenly with optical formats... (640-700mb cdr : 1gb sdcard. 4.5gb dvd : 8gb sdcard. 9gb dvd : 12/16gb sdcard) but the form factor is much smaller, you can store waaay more data in a similar sized wallet, and they are less easily destroyed by frequent handling.

Yes. I KNOW they are more expensive. I also remember when cdrs cost over a dollar a pop. These devices don't have to be blazing fast to replace optical media, and while I know it won't be a popular subject with the demographic here, it WOULD work quite well with software firms, because sdcards have to be able to support special hardware drm features to be spec compliant. (This means that your spiffy boxed 3d game you bought off the shelf can chug slowly on install, use your fast sata drive at runtime, and use the sdcard as a dongle to verify game purchase, all in the same package. I am surprised that no software house has tried it yet.

The cards themselves don't need to be fast really, so cheap organic semiconductors, like those used in flexible displays that can exceed amorphous silicon speeds could be used to make the bulk pack cheapo ones.

Like any product, as long as it remains a niche, specialty product it will be expensive, but when it becomes a widespread multi use product, economies of scale drive down the price. I can easily see flash going that way, especially for slow but cheap sdcards.

While I can't imagine installing an optical drive in a computer an external one is handy for software that still ships on optical media as well as ripping the occasional cd or dvd. I use my external drive less and less but I know if I didn't have it I'd have to borrow someone else's sooner or later.

Translation: "I don't have decent broadband in the backwater where I live, so I have to select the special 'ship me a CD' option and pay extra when I buy software.... [whine, whine, whine]"

I don't have any stats handy, but the percentage of software that is distributed on optical media has been plummeting in recent years. The software that isn't available for direct download is dwindling fast. Yes, I buy software, and I buy most of it online, and download it on the spot. My broadband is kinda sucky too,

you're right, that IS cheating not to have those. A new usb keyboard and mouse from several place on eBay can be had for $11. But the monitor is a killer, for young eyes could squeak by with a 15 inch that sometimes is under $100, but at my age that's going to cost unless buying used or refurbished. I'm on a 23" widescreen samsung now that was $250 refurbished with warranty. but there goes a cheap computer budget.

I've bought 4 USB thumb drives over the past 5 years and so far, 2 have failed. These little bastards weren't cheap either. I've also got CDs I burned about 7 years ago that still work fine. Not ONE failure. Therefore, everything gets backed up to DVDs.

The car stereo also doesn't play MP3s (2007 model, factory stereo) so I can either A: spend about $200 on an aftermarket mp3 adapter or B: burn CDs.

Realy? I've fond hard drives to be cheap and effective.1TB of storage is a monsterous stack of DVD's or a small hard drive. 2TB is even worse.

As far as hard drive reliability, make 2 or 3 copies. 3 2TB hard drives is pretty easy to handle, DVD's pretty darn difficult.I don't have a blu ray drive, but I dont' see it being momumentally better.

Good point. I have already started using an HD for backups but I still back up to optical too, just in case the HD dies. It certainly is a chore to make several DVDs to back up several GB of files but at least if one or two go bad, I have more backups. If a HD goes bad, I'm screwed.

However, even more to your point, the price per GB falls every year and capacity increases. Behold HD size in rough terms:

1985: top-of-the-line HD had MAYBE 10MB. It also cost about $5000.1995: about 8-10 GB. Cost: I honestly don

But what the hell does someone do with 100 PB? As is the case with CPU speeds, we will eventually hit a ceiling. Except in this case, the ceiling will be what is practical vs. what is possible. I can't imagine someone ever using that much HD space except for perhaps a company that never destroys old customer data.

You lack imagination then. I can easily think of someone using that much without even breaking a sweat, like e.g. many people like to keep a pristine collection of their music files as FLAC files, and those tend to take a lot of space. Similarly, many people like to keep 1:1 copies of their movies and animation and TV series, and even at 1080p those tend to eat space like crazy. And just think about it: in 2020 1080p will be really low resolution and movies will likely weigh in at about 200Gb even with reas

But what the hell does someone do with 100 PB?...
...I can't imagine someone ever using that much HD space except for perhaps a company that never destroys old customer data.

It seems to me I remember sometime along in the early 90's arguing with my wife about whether to put a 40MB HD in our new comp, or an 85MB HD. The wife couldn't imagine ever filling up 40MB, much less 85 MB.

Pretty much same argument happened a few years back, arguing over whether to put a 250GB HD in a new comp. That time, *I* was th

Kind of tangentially on-topic (wink-wink), but... I am planning to upgrade my home server machine, which has been humming not so quietly since 2003. Sadly, I have not much dabbed in PC hardware since then -- do you guys know any online references with example configuration for decent, quiet machines to use as a starting point? My basic requirements are ecc registered ram, a terabyte or so of some kind of raid, a quad CPU and a well-supported video running Linux and, very occasionally, an odd windows instan

I think the real cheat is any budget that involves a mail-in rebate.The article starts out about financial difficulties and then provides a price that doesn't reflect the walk home price. 3-6 weeks you might make that money back IF you are lucky that the rebate was honored.

I'm currently on a bit of a "get legit" roll when it comes to my media. All my software is acquired legally via the net so that's OK, it's just stuff like movies and music that I still require an optical drive for. Why?

1. I like my music in FLAC format. There are very few digital music stores which sell in this format. My favourite by far is http://bandcamp.com/ [bandcamp.com] but they don't have much mainstream/big-artist stuff.

2. Even if I didn't have a preference for FLAC, there aren't any legal digital music stores around which service my needs with at least a high-bitrate MP3. I don't want to use iTunes because I don't want to deal with AAC (I can convert them but I don't want a dependency on iTunes anyway). Amazon still hasn't, for whatever reason, opened an MP3 store here in Australia yet despite promising to open up to the world many years ago.

So what do I do? I buy music CDs and rip them to FLAC. I buy DVDs and use HandBrake to convert them, or just play them directly with VLC. Both of these cases require an optical drive, and until such a time occurs that physical sales of media are completely abolished, I will continue to do this. UNLESS... a suitable online store apears in my area which sells non-DRMed music AND video of what I want, in my preferred format. At this rate that's going to take a very long time (if ever), so I do what I can to stave off piracy.

It fails because you need to load an OS from somewhere, from something, so you need to include the cost of the USB stick and time/cost of downloading Linux. I didn't see the cost of HD cable either. CPU Heatsink? Minor stuff but it all adds up. 2 GB of ram? pfft. Why have a HD at all? boot from USB and use Network storage.

I've done it that way for fun but usb boot/system disk and internet storage are too dang slow.

but you don't need to worry about install media, just borrow from your local bsd or linux evangelist. I loan out cd or usb stick, and have done installs for friends and coworkers on their personal machines. wish I had some stickers of dead microsoft colored butterfly men that I could put on case of my laptop every time I kill a windows install. hmmm, that could work as a web page too....

From www.tigerdirect.com I bought one of their "kit" computers with an AMD Quad Core CPU, 2gb of Ram, a 500gb HD, a DVD r/w, and Ubuntu. I added a kb with a touchpad that I already had around the office and "viola!" a sub-200 desktop *with* optical drive. I haven't done a thing to it since... and I'm posting from it now.

I've done quite a few system builds using this AMD bundle deal that Micro Center has had going on for some time now. Every single system works flawlessly, even the ones with the Powerspec case/power supply (more business if the PSU does fail, and I haven't seen one take a motherboard out yet.)

You have an overclockable dual core CPU (I wouldn't push too far with the stock heatsink and with that motherboard, but a little bump to 3.6 GHz shouldn't be an issue.), better graphics than the system in the article, twice as much system memory (4gb vs. 2gb), an optical drive, an actual decent power supply, a case with a handle on it, and I could probably go on, but i'd hope you all get the point. A whole $45 more before tax, not including the lame $8 mail in rebate for the power supply. Definitely worth every penny, and this is all something you could pick up and have together in a couple hours assuming you have a store close to you. Most would likely pay $40+ for the convenience alone. I also didn't shop around too much. Better might be possible.

Not this hardware abi driver interface bullshit again, you bring it up all the time.. and it is addressed all the time. ( I think this is the third of fourth time I've replied to you on this topic on/. alone, usually long write-ups but don't have the time today)

While this is old, it is something you may find interesting [mjmwired.net]. In short, you don't want a fixed abi, what you want, are stable drivers.

6) Docx support, whilst I prefer open office to MS Office in general. In OO/LibreOffice Docx support is terrible (Images in wrong place, different table sizes, no word art, etc). Nb. from my experience the same isn't true the other way round, open office documents usually display fine in word.

Disclaimer: I dual boot ubuntu with Gnome 3 (btw Unity is reason 7 if we are talking specifically about Ubuntu) and Win 7. For programing, internet browsing and file operations linux is generally better

I have used WINE for MS Office (which I did not pirate) in the past and it has worked reasonably well (although still a pain, which is why CrossOver Office exists) however it would not have been easy enough for an average user (don't know if CrossOver Office fixes this).
If I ever switched to a none dual boot system in the future I might get it (at this point in time there are often stupid little things I need Win 7 for).
In general linux seems to be slightly less stable then win 7, I do however use Ubuntu

1) Itunes - sure there are plenty of great media players and what not for linux... but if you have an ios device whether its a new ipod, ipod touch, iphone, or ipad (and literally tens of millions of completely normal people do, they need itunes).

My dad uses Winamp to sync his iPod. He wants to manage his music the way he wants to do it, and not the way Apple tells him to do it. Now granted, Winamp is Windows software, and while I don't know of or care to find similar software for Linux, saying it requires iTunes is false.

2) TurboTax etc... yep its just one week a year. But millions of completely ordinary people do their taxes with this type of software.

TurboTax doesn't do anything particularly funky with respect to Windows. I see no reason why this couldn't run on WINE. You could argue that most people would have no clue how to run an application through WINE. You could also

It is if you want anything with serious horsepower. Sure, a commodity PC will work fine for most things but if you want 8 cores and 64gb of ram with multiple video cards you'll be better off building it yourself.

To instal Windows? To install most versions of Linux? To install a large number of commercial products (E.g. Photoshop)? To boot from a live CD when having boot problems? To install the free stuff that comes with computer Magazines?To play BD movies (I don't live in US and I prefer not to pirate everything)